Casa de Colibríes

At Home With Hummingbirds 

Michael Sedano 

Concha screamed in agony. The smaller boy heard her pain and understood immediately something awful had taken place. The older boy stood over the pile of green and brown feathers staring stupidly at what he'd accomplished. 

Concha gave him a look of pity and picked up the carcass. In a few seconds, Concha returned from inside carrying a hefty black book. The woman opened the Bible to some random page in the middle, laid down the dead bird and closed the book around it to dry. Concha told the small boy about la chuparrosa's magic and how she would keep the dried body for luck. 

It wasn't lucky for the hummingbird. The boy didn't understand that part. He knew about lucky rabbit's feet, but didn't understand that part, either. 

--La Bloga, May 2021. 

That’s the beginning of my attachment to hummingbirds. I am that smaller boy in the story, which occurs in Spanish at my grandmother’s house, sometime around 1949.

I can see Concha’s Biblia, how she brought it out into the sunlight. She had some flowers pressed in the pages of that book that proved to my eyes the efficacy of using books to dry stuff. 

Today, almost eighty years later, I have a photographer’s memory of hummingbirds. That is, I remember where I’ve seen them nectaring on one or another tree, shrub, or flowers, and I return with my longest lens, time and again. 

I stalk the Huntington Library and Los Angeles County Arboretum in search of good fotos. I talk to the gardeners—mostly in Spanish—asking where they’ve seen colibri in the area. The gardeners are from different places and they call the flying jewels chuparosa or picaflor, in addition to colibri. 

Chicano literature expresses high regard for hummingbirds. Luis Alberto Urrea’s gifted readers his Hummingbird’s Daughter (link), which isn’t about hummingbirds per se. My favorite literary hummingbird is Graciela Limon’s title character in Song of the Hummingbird. The character, Huitzitzilín, is named hummingbird in her native Mexica language, and has a mind faster than a speeding colibri as she torments the Inquisitor assigned to civilize her. 

I live well, after Alzheimer’s, and now, post-Eaton fire. My daughter bought a house where the yerba buena grows like a weed and mejor, a hedge of Cuphea ignea, cigar flower, firecracker flower, that hummingbirds love. I noticed that right away when I moved here las Fall.

Instead of walking miles and waiting half an hour or so for a glorious sight, I sit outside near my front door, lens pointed toward the hedge and wait. And wait. With enough patience, and a healthy dose of serendipity, these sparkling souls share themselves with a happy photographer.

While I enjoy the walkabout and all the other critters I get to see and photograph, I like the thought "cast down your buckets where you are." I'm not forced to look anywhere but here, I don't have to click my ruby slippers incanting "there's no place like home" but that's the way it is, for my hummers and me, there's no place like home.